Ellie who? Elihu two, three, four...

As I mentioned earlier, Elihu has been an object of interest as I've revisited the Book of Job once again. His role at the end of the book has been ignored or misunderstood from the dawning of this story on the human consciousness.

Elihu? here's what Strong's Hebrew dictionary shows for H453: 
אליהוּא    אליהוּ 
'ĕlîyhû  'ĕlîyhû' (el-ee-hoo', el-ee-hoo'); From H410 and H1931;
God of him; Elihu, the name of one of Job’s friends, and of three Israelites: - Elihu.

God of him.

I did a little search on the name Elihu in Wikipedia turned up 13: three characters in literature (one of them our subject in this blog), and ten individuals with Anno Domini birth certificates and social histories that can be researched and debated. The first one that got my attention is Elihu Yale, the namesake and one of the first benefactors of Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Here's his signature:signature of Elihu Yale

One of the other significant Elihu namesakes is Elihu Root, an American statesman who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912. As a senator (New York) in 1913, he opposed the creation of the Federal Reserve Board, and prophetically described its characteristics that we're inheriting today, noting that the legislation would create an "expansive currency" which puts the Federal Reserve at risk for building too high a structure to be sustained. Oh, well. Here we are, in the midst of the crashing of that shaky structure.

The next Elihu that caught my interest was Elihu Washburne, one of the founders of the Republican Party in the 1850s. The Wikipedia article on Washburne says that he was noted for his courage: he was the Republican Party official who didn't back off the responsibility to meet Abraham Lincoln upon his arrival in Washington, D.C. in 1861 when he came to assume his presidential office. Other Republican leaders feared an assassination attempt on Lincoln, and didn't want to be in the welcoming party.

There are others. Elihu Vedder was a symbolist painter in the late 1800s and early 1900s who hung out with the likes of Herman Melville and Ernest Hemingway. His paintings hang in public buildings in Washington, D.C., and are most familiar as illustrations in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Worth a look are a couple of his paintings: a tiny one titled The Roc's Egg and a bleak panorama called The Dead Abel.

Just four of the characters that bear the name Elihu.

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